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Chicano chic: fashion/costume/play
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Content
Chicano Chic: Fashion/Costume/Play
by
David Evans Frantz
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS (CURATORIAL PRACTICES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE)
August 2017
Copyright 2017 David Evans Frantz
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Chicano Chic: Fashion/Costume/Play” grew from research I conducted as the co-curator of the
exhibition Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., organized by ONE National Gay &
Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries for Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. Axis Mundo will be
on view at the ONE Gallery, West Hollywood, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles’s Pacific Design Center venue from September 9 through December 31, 2017.
Collaborating on this project with co-curator C. Ondine Chavoya has been as professionally
rewarding as it has been personally enjoyable and I thank him for his invaluable insight and
friendship in organizing the exhibition as well as his assistance in preparing this text. Additional
thanks are due to the Getty Foundation for their generous and foundational support of Axis
Mundo through Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. Without their commitment to deep research and
new scholarship this project and text would not have been possible.
In addition to Chavoya, Macarena Gómez-Barris provided editorial assistance with this
text as a member of the Axis Mundo team and I thank her for her consideration. Along the way
Audrey Walen provided vital copyediting and Nina Lewallen Hufford was an expert proofreader
and I appreciate their keen eye and grammatical know-how.
Special thanks are due to my committee chair Amelia Jones for her perspectives on my
writing and research and for her assistance in shepherding this text as a thesis in the Roski
School of Art and Design’s MA Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere program. Thanks as
well to my thesis readers Andy Campbell and Karen Moss for their attention and support.
Finally, and mostly significantly, I would like to thank those who helped make the
research for this writing possible. Numerous individuals, including many of the artists discussed
here as well as the friends, family members, and loved one of other artists this text considers, met
with me and Chavoya on multiple occasions to share stories and memories, as well as make their
personal collections available for research. Special thanks are due to Simon Doonan, Anthony
Friedkin, Gronk, Marsha Bentley Hale, Harry Gamboa Jr., Jef Huereque, Robert Lambert,
Robert Legorreta, Pat Meza, Patricia Navarro, Paul Polubinskas, Joey Terrill, Patssi Valdez,
Johanna Went, and Roberto Vargas. Through the process of organizing Axis Mundo I have had
the privilege to research a generation of artists I wish I had the opportunity to know, many of
which are discussed in this thesis. This text is dedicated to Mundo Meza, Jerry Dreva, Ray
Navarro, Teddy Sandoval, and Jack Vargas for their visionary work.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract iv
List of Figures v
Introduction 1
Section 1: Glitter Youth 4
Section 2: Clones and Homeboys 15
Section 3: Window to Stage 24
Conclusion 30
Figures 33
Bibliography 54
iv
ABSTRACT
This essay explores self-presentation, costuming, and fashion as found across the practices of a
generation of artists working in Los Angeles between the late 1960s and early 1980s. Focusing
on the contributions of queer Chicano artists, the works discussed are situated within social,
cultural, and political contexts, often with an eye on music cultures, exploring how these artists
and their work circulated and intersected with the work of other peers in sometimes surprising
ways. The artists discussed include the group Les Petites Bonbons (led by Jerry Dreva and
Robert Lambert), Mundo Meza, Joey Terrill, Teddy Sandoval, Jack Vargas, and Johanna Went.
For these artists, radical self-fashioning through thrift-store glamour or punk improvisation at
times intersected with activist sloganeering and political visibility. In other instances, a focus on
identity construction and gender performativity allowed queer Chicano artists to both
irreverently depict and critically examine masculinity. For some, the fashion industry provided a
means of professional employment that accommodated creative experimentation and public
presentation. An examination of the physical and conceptual spaces in which these self-
fashioned identities flourished and intersected—the street, the club, and through the mail—
shows how the work of these artists promiscuously redefined where and how art and life
practices dwelled and merged queerly.
v
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 1: Anthony Friedkin, Jim and Mundo in Mundo’s Bedroom, Montebello, East Los Angeles,
1972 (printed 2017). Photograph from an unprinted negative for The Gay Essay, 1969–73.
Gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm). Gift of Anthony Friedkin. ONE National Gay &
Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries
Fig. 2: Anthony Friedkin, Jim, Restroom at Trouper’s Hall, Hollywood, 1970 (printed 2017).
From The Gay Essay, 1969–73. Gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm). Gift of
Anthony Friedkin. ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries
Fig. 3: Joey Terrill and Efren Valadez, Flyer for the Gay Funky Dances at Troupers Hall,
c. 1974. Collection of Joey Terrill
Fig. 4: Jerry Dreva, Colorful cock print sent to Mikhail Itkin, c. 1973. Day-Glo paint, stickers,
and ink on paper, 7 x 11 in. (17.8 x 27.9 cm). Mikhail Itkin Papers. ONE National Gay &
Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries
Fig. 5: Flyer from Les Petites Bonbons sent to Mikhail Itkin, c. 1973. Black-and-white thermal
photocopy, 11 x 8 ½ in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm). Mikhail Itkin Papers. ONE National Gay & Lesbian
Archives at the USC Libraries
Fig. 6: Cover of FILE Megazine 3, no. 1, “Glamour Issue” (Autumn 1975), and interior spread
showing Les Petites Bonbons’ submission of Angela Bowie’s golden gloves. Collection of
Robert Lambert. Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber
Fig. 7: Asco, No Movie photo postcard, Parting Lips Party (1976), sent to Robert Lambert’s
Egozine by Gronk, postmarked August 16, 1976. Photo by Harry Gamboa Jr. Collection of
Robert Lambert. © Harry Gamboa Jr.
Fig. 8: Robert Legorreta (Cyclona), Scrapbook page with Cyclona, Mundo Meza, and friends,
c. early 1970s (date assembled unknown). Color photographs on construction paper, 11 ¼ x 11 ¾
in. (27.9 x 29.8 cm). Cyclona Collection. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
Fig. 9: Joey Terrill, Le Club for Boys (Two Brandos), c. 1975–76. Mixed-media on vellum and
paper, 14 x 16 ¾ in. (35.6 x 42.5 cm). Collection of Joey Terrill. Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber
Fig. 10: Teddy Sandoval, Untitled illustration reproduced in In Touch for Men, no. 56 (June
1981). ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries
Fig. 11: Teddy Sandoval, Installation in the artist’s studio in Downtown Los Angeles, c. 1978.
Gronk Papers. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
Fig. 12: Teddy Sandoval, American Tacos mail art postcard, postmarked March 7, 1978, sent to
Robert Lambert’s Egozine. Ink on paper, 8 ½ x 5 ½ in. (21.6 x 14 cm). Collection of Robert
Lambert. Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber
vi
Fig. 13: Jack Vargas, Suburban J, c. 1975. Color photocopy newsletter, 8 ½ x 7 in. (21.6 x 17.8
cm) folded. Collection of Joey Terrill. Photograph by Ian Byers-Gamber
Fig. 14: Participants in the Christopher Street West Pride parade wearing Joey Terrill’s malflora
and maricón T-shirts, June 1976. Terrill appears third from the left. Photo by Teddy Sandoval.
Courtesy of Paul Polubinskas
Fig. 15: The Lavender & Red Book: A Gay Liberation/Socialist Anthology (April 1976). Cover
features Joey Terrill, his cousin Pat, and her then girlfriend Martha, wearing T-shirts produced
by Terrill. ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries
Fig. 16: Simon Doonan and Mundo Meza, Documentation of a window display at Maxfield
Bleu, West Hollywood, August 1981. Courtesy of Simon Doonan
Fig. 17: Mundo Meza, Documentation of a window display at Maxfield Bleu, West Hollywood,
c. early 1980s. Photo by Mundo Meza. Courtesy of Marsha Bentley Hale
Fig. 18: Mundo Meza, Documentation of a window display at Maxfield Bleu, West Hollywood,
c. early 1980s. Photo by Mundo Meza. Courtesy of Marsha Bentley Hale
Fig. 19: Johanna Went, Documentation of an untitled performance at the Hong Kong Café, Los
Angeles, July 11, 1980. Photos by Ferrara Brain Pan. Courtesy of Ferrara Brain Pan
Fig. 20: Jef Huereque and Mundo Meza dressed as “Drag Queens from Outer Space,” c. 1982–
83. Collection of Jef Huereque
Fig. 21: DIVA TV, Stills featuring Ray Navarro from Like a Prayer, 1990. Digitized VHS video,
28 min. Ray Navarro Papers and Videos. ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC
Libraries
INTRODUCTION
An image culled from Anthony Friedkin’s archive of unprinted negatives from the series The
Gay Essay (1969–73) presents the bedroom of the artist Mundo Meza at his family’s home East
Los Angeles [Fig. 1]. Then a teenager, Meza appears with his close friend Jim Aguilar, whom
the photographer met at the Gay Funky Dances, all-ages events for queer youth at Hollywood’s
Troupers Hall. Friedkin captures a dazzling array of textures in this image: a thick, crocheted
blanket of alternating striped blocks dominates the foreground; shelves cluttered with
knickknacks, sculptures, and art supplies can be seen behind the pair; Meza’s photo-graphs and
artworks are tacked to the shelves and line the walls (most prominently, a nude painting of Mick
Jagger is propped up behind Meza). While this portrait is clearly staged, Meza’s and Aguilar’s
relaxed attire, Meza’s foppish, billowing curls, and the calm embrace between the two convey
the exceptional intimacy captured. Meza’s bedroom displays the traces of fandom, play,
creativity, and psychedelic fantasy that would define his practice as an artist, while Friedkin
captures the affect of queer youth culture at the junction of gay liberation and Chicano activism.
I begin with this introspective image as a point of departure into a thesis that examines
how, through style, self-presentation, costuming, and fashion, queer publicness was playfully
enacted and embodied. While this particular image from Meza’s bedroom was not originally
selected for Friedkin’s organization of The Gay Essay, other images of Meza and numerous
photographs of Aguilar from the series circulated at the time. A striking portrait of Meza and
Aguilar together at a hot-dog stand was featured in a 1973 issue of Gay Sunshine, an
underground newspaper printed in San Francisco.
1
A window into activist and counterculture
circles of 1970s Los Angeles, the presence of both Meza and Aguilar within Friedkin’s series
1
Gay Sunshine 19 (September–October 1973): 6–11.
2
highlights how queer Chicanos took up dress and play to disrupt identity in ways that have gone
largely unexamined in prior studies of queer and Chicano artistic production.
The queer Chicano artists and their collaborators discussed in this thesis engaged with
fashion broadly as a site of play and queer potentiality. As art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson has
noted, the diverse artistic practices emerging in California in the 1970s frequently utilized self-
fashioning and performance to “upend or trouble conventional codes of race, gender, and
sexuality.”
2
She writes that artists often used a “keen-eyed scavenger aesthetic,”
3
while their
proximity to particular social movements helped define certain West Coast practices. The
relation to music cultures, ranging from the gender-bending extravagance of glam, or glitter rock,
to the confrontation and self-styling of punk, as well as the imaginative costuming of the New
Romantics, I would add, was also formative. In considering how twentieth-century male artists
utilized clothing and self-presentation to bolster their avant-garde identity, art historian Amelia
Jones has observed, “Identity is not fixed by clothing but takes its meanings through an exchange
between subjects, communicated through sartorial codes (as well as, of course, codes of skin
color, body type, gesture, etc.).”
4
Working with and within the aesthetic investments of
intersecting activist, popular, and subcultural scenes provided exceptional fodder for queer
Chicano artists experimenting with the mutability of identity through style and self-presentation.
For the artists I explore here, radical self-fashioning through thrift-store glamour or punk
improvisation at times intersected with activist sloganeering and political visibility. In other
instances, a focus on identity construction and gender performativity allowed queer Chicano
artists to both irreverently depict and critically examine masculinity. For some, the fashion
2
Julia Bryan-Wilson, “To Move, To Dress, To Work, To Act: Playing Gender and Race in 1970s California Art,”
State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, ed. Constance M. Lewallen and Karen Moss (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2011), 197.
3
Ibid., 201
4
Amelia Jones, “‘Clothes Make the Man’: The Male Artist as a Performative Function,” The Oxford Art Journal 18,
no. 2 (1995): 18.
3
industry provided a means of professional employment that accommodated creative
experimentation and public presentation. By placing importance on craft, texture, and
materiality, coupled with an emphasis on the performative possibility of adornment and
embodiment—in private or on the streets, on the stage or in the boutique window—I seek to
connect these experimental projects to the quotidian. An examination of the physical and
conceptual spaces in which these self-fashioned identities flourished and intersected—the street,
the club, and through the mail—shows how the work of these artists promiscuously redefined
where and how art and life practices dwelled and merged queerly.
In discussing the work of Les Petites Bonbons, Mundo Meza, Joey Terrill, Teddy
Sandoval, Jack Vargas, Johanna Went, and others, the observations that follow build upon
archival research, oral histories, and documentary speculation, as well as a bit of gossip.
5
In
numerous cases, the threads connecting these artists are not only conceptual and aesthetic but
also lived; all were members of intimate scenes of friends, collaborators, and lovers working in
Los Angeles during the 1970s and early 1980s. Not all of the artists discussed are Chicana/os. By
exploring the intersection of multiple cultural and artistic scenes, and examining in-stances of
collaboration and cultural cross-pollination, this thesis looks broadly at artists working in cultural
contexts that supported queer Chicanos as well as other gay, lesbian, trans, and women artists
and performers. The connections may be surprising, linking artists whose work may be strongly
identified with distinct genres or artistic histories. While the genealogy presented is specifically
5
The importance of chisme (gossip) as a mode of knowing within Latina/o communities and as a means to charting
queer Chicana/o artistic histories should not be discounted, nor should its importance within the historical moment
be overlooked. Consider, for example, the magazine Chismearte, published by the Concilio de Arte Popular from
1976–83. Regarding gossip, performance artist Vaginal Davis has stated, on multiple occasions in various
iterations, “Archives are gossip and gossip is the one true endless archive.” Lauren Palmer, “Transgender Artists
Take Control at ‘Bring Your Own Body’ Exhibition,” artnet news, October 13, 2015, accessed April 1, 2017,
https://news.artnet.com/market/transgender-artists-vaginal-davis-show-332409. For still another consideration of
gossip’s role in relation to queerness, see Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art
World, 1948–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
4
tied to Southern California, the practices of these artists occurred within an expansive cultural
lens of national political activism and international cultural and popular movements. Thus I
propose alternate genealogies of queerness and Chicano art in Los Angeles that seek to be as
expansive, mutable, and playful as the works examined.
GLITTER YOUTH
To begin, let’s dance. At the invitation of Morris Kight, Anthony Friedkin first visited the Gay
Funky Dances in 1969. Held every Friday at Troupers Hall on La Brea Avenue just south of
Hollywood Boulevard, the dances were organized by the recently founded Gay Community
Services Center (GCSC) to cater to the queer youth of the flowering gay liberation movement,
which had received national attention after several nights of rioting at New York’s Stonewall Inn
during June 1969.
6
That same year, Friedkin began work on The Gay Essay, in which he
intended to produce a photographic portrait of the emerging liberationist gay community.
Friedkin’s series was expansive in scope and included images of leading activists, such as the
founder of the Metropolitan Community Church Reverend Troy Perry, GCSC founders Kight
and Don Kilhefner, and documentation of Los Angeles’ first Gay Pride parade. However, it is the
images of unidentified and little-known individuals that are perhaps the most powerful of the
series, depicting a constellated community that was confident and unapologetic in allowing
themselves to be seen in spite of societal homophobia and violence: hustlers on Selma Avenue in
Hollywood, drag queens backstage, a young lesbian couple on the street, as well as striking
6
While the events of Stonewall brought the existence of a defiant, young, and visible gay counterculture to
Friedkin’s attention, it should be noted that Los Angeles had its own rich history of queer activism and revolt,
including the protests against police harassment at the Black Cat Tavern in February 1967 and the earlier riot by
drag queens, hustlers, and transgender individuals at Cooper’s Donuts in May 1959.
5
images from Troupers, especially of the event hall’s restroom. In these scenes, young people
converse, comfort one another, kiss, and primp before the mirror. Friedkin, who during the years
of this project was himself in his late teens and early twenties, was not much older than many of
his subjects, making it easy for him to connect with them. By using his lightweight and
unobtrusive 35mm Leica M4 camera, he was able to capture scenes of unrestricted intimacy.
At Troupers, Friedkin first met and photographed Mundo Meza and Jim Aguilar. In these
images, Aguilar’s soft androgyny (friends referred to Aguilar as “Pretty Jim”
7
) is complemented
by the application of high-arched Bette Davis–style eyebrows and rays of eye shadow that speak
to the influence the gender-bending extravagance of glitter rock was beginning to have on this
youthful, nascent scene [Fig. 2]. Unlike the photographs of Aguilar and Meza in Meza’s
bedroom, here Aguilar is decidedly dressed-up—long slacks, wide-shouldered blazer, dangling
scarf, and glistening brooch complement flowing hair and dramatic makeup. As recalled by artist
Joey Terrill in a 2005 interview, the Troupers dances were a space for experimentation and
coming-of-age in sexuality and style. Kids at the dances employed ingenuity in their dress,
combining thrift-store finds from the 1930s and 1940s with other items, such as mixing a vintage
Hawaiian print shirt with beads and glimmering appliques.
8
Terrill also emphasizes the give-and-
take community-enabling impact of this sartorial play, recounting, “Oh, did you see that person
last weekend? I think I’m gonna try that with this.” For the racially diverse group of young
people, many of whom traveled long distances to attend, as well as the homeless youths for
7
Joey Terrill, conversation with the author, 2015, Los Angeles. A large photograph of Aguilar appears in the first
issue of Terrill’s Homeboy Beautiful (1978), identifying Aguilar as homo-homeboy “Fred,” self-consciously playing
with the way Aguilar’s androgyny confused gender expectations.
8
Terrill specifically mentions the Goodwill, though it should be noted that beginning in 1970 the GCSC also ran a
thrift store, the Gaywill Funky Shoppe, located on Griffith Park Boulevard, with proceeds benefitting the Center’s
early activities. Thus, the emerging gay movement was not only seeking to foster community through dances but
also through the establishment of a network of spaces and venues to be patronized. Lillian Faderman and Stuart
Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic Books,
2006), 172.
6
whom the dances provided a vital space of connection and community, the dances were a nodal
point for like-minded and creative young people.
9
Troupers was where Terrill first connected
with Meza—Terrill recalls him in a “satin kind of suit with big ruffles and glitter in his hair”—as
well as artists Gronk and Patssi Valdez.
10
Along with friend Efren Valadez, Terrill produced a
flyer promoting the Troupers dances: the elongated, art deco–inspired hand-drawn text, reading
“Les Libertines de Troupers,” mimics the waifish dancing gay and lesbian couples in platform
shoes [Fig. 3]. While not part of The Gay Essay, contact proofs of photographs taken by Friedkin
show Terrill entering the dance hall surrounded by a crowd of young people. They also show
Gronk, posing in the Troupers restroom with Aguilar, as well as a young man gesturing
energetically outside the hall in a tangled blond wig, sunglasses, and a denim jacket with, on the
back, rhinestones arranged to spell out “Les Petites Bonbons” within a heart: this was the artist
Jerry Dreva, recently arrived from Milwaukee.
Friedkin’s photographs capture a racially diverse and aesthetically distinctive queer youth
culture in Los Angeles that has received scant attention. The images shot for The Gay Essay also
capture the stylistic and cultural rupture from late 1960s bohemia to early 1970s glam.
Originating in the United Kingdom in 1971, glam cut across fashion, performance, photography,
film, and, most prominently, popular music, and emphasized theatricality, excess, artificiality,
and androgyny. Glam prominently placed the potentiality of style and surface over substance.
The genre’s proclivities for upending gender roles through transvestism, camp, and costuming,
and the public flirtation with homosexuality practiced by stars such as David Bowie and Marc
9
Oral history interview with Joey Terrill, interview by Stuart Timmons, 2005, audio-recording, ONE National Gay
& Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.
10
Ibid.
7
Bolan, both fed on and contributed to the growing visibility of gay and lesbian communities at
the time.
11
While glam in the United States never attained the same widespread popularity as it did
in the United Kingdom, Los Angeles quickly became a center of glitter rock. The city’s most
famous (and notorious) glitter club, Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco, opened in 1972 and
quickly attracted stars such as Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls as well as hordes of idolizing
groupies. David Bowie debuted in Southern California at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on
October 20, 1972, part of his tour for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from
Mars, in which he performed as a polysexual alien alter ego with flaming orange hair, sparkling
makeup, and glittering jump-suits. Newspaper accounts dismissed the performance for its
theatricality and the cult-like devotion of the audience.
12
Meza, operating within this milieu of
glitter fandom, was said to have produced portraits of Bowie, part of his series of paintings of
rock stars of the early 1970s. The nude painting of Rolling Stones’ front man Mick Jagger seen
in the image that begins this thesis may have been part of this series, displaying how Meza’s
engagement in music cultures rendered these stars, who were publicly flirting with
homosexuality, as explicitly queer objects of both adoration and desire. That the nude portrait of
Jagger appears without or with obscured genitals muddles stable gender positions while also
hinting at the complications the teenage artist might have faced producing such charged images
while still living in his parents’ home.
13
The group Les Petites Bonbons also had a particular
11
For more information of the aesthetics and history of glam, see Barney Hoskyns, Glam! Bowie, Bolan and the
Glitter Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1998); Philip Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and
Theatricality in Popular Music (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006); and Glam: The Performance
of Style, ed. Darren Pih (Liverpool, U.K.: Tate Liverpool, 2013).
12
Chris Van Ness, “David Bowie,” Los Angeles Free Press, October 27, 1972, part 2; Robert Hilburn, “David
Bowie Rocks in Santa Monica,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 1972.
13
For a different history of Chicano world-making related to glam and David Bowie, see playwright Gregg Barrio’s
accounting of a 1976 play by Chicano high school students in Crystal City, Texas, inspired by Bowie. Gregg
8
investment in the glitter scene and a fondness for the extravagance and self-presentation
proposed by musicians such as Bowie.
Founded in 1971, Les Petites Bonbons was a conceptual group led by Jerry Dreva and
Robert Lambert that grew from gay liberation organizing in Milwaukee. Dreva and Lambert’s
prolific distribution of flyers, publicity clippings, a series of missives and quotes under the
banner of “bon bon mots,” and small objects sent through the mail tapped into both gay
liberation politics and the growing network of correspondence artists circumventing art world
institutions to form artistic counterpublics, many that were often distinctly queer in their tactics
and content.
14
The group’s frequent mailings, often individually made works in series or
uniquely embellished or collaged photocopies, included a series of Day-Glo kisses encircled by
the word “revolution” on newspaper, sometimes the stock-market tally section; a certificate for
use of poetic license; a card stamped multiple times with Dreva’s penis, also in bright Day-Glo
paint, to form a radiating bouquet pattern [Fig. 4]; and a flyer reproducing an image of the group
that asked the viewer to “Please imagine a gay universe NOWhere” at a specific dates and time
(June 16, 17, 20 at 9 p.m.), allowing multiple interpretations of queer utopianism (“now here”
versus “no where”) [Fig. 5]. Many of these ephemeral pieces were annotated and circulated
widely, sent as one-off items, or compiled into elaborately decorated press packets that were
distributed to art world figures such as Lucy R. Lippard and Andy Warhol, gay activists such as
Mikhail Itkin and the publishers of Gay Sunshine,
15
and musicians such as David Bowie and Igg
y Pop, reflective of the Bonbons’ intersecting audiences/publics. In their extensive
correspondence, Lambert and Dreva would also share clippings, flyers, and other odds-and-ends,
Barrios, “David Bowie in Aztlán,” The Texas Observer, June 23, 2016, accessed April 19, 2017,
https://www.texasobserver.org/david-bowie-in-aztlan/.
14
For more on mail art, queerness, and fan clubs, see Kirsten Olds, “Fannies and Fanzines: Mail Art and Fan
Clubs in the 1970s,” Journal of Fandom Studies 2, no. 2 (June 2015): 171–93.
15
Both collections are housed at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.
9
a time capsule–like window into their day-to-day activities. A large envelope sent on November
8, 1972, includes a promotional plastic bag from Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust appearance at the Santa
Monica Civic Auditorium, a menu from the rock club Whiskey A Go Go, and a clipped
photograph from the widely distributed gay newspaper the Advocate featuring Chicana lesbian
activist Jeanne Córdova and gay activists Morris Kight and Jim Kepner alongside Itkin shown
wearing a Les Petites Bonbons T-shirt.
16
With these packages, the most ephemeral and ersatz of
materials become fabulous cast-off markers of life become art, packed within a singular envelope
that contains the convergence of multiple worlds.
In their play with faux celebrity, the Bonbons both mimicked and lampooned the cult of
fandom that epitomized the glitter scene in L.A., which, according to Barney Hoskyns in Glam!
Bowie, Bolan and the Glitter Revolution, was defined not by its artists but by the fervent passion
and quantity of groupies and fans.
17
For the Bonbons, fandom was a mode of production in itself.
For example, in the autumn 1975 “Glamour Issue” of the influential mail art publication FILE
Megazine, published out of Toronto by the artist group General Idea, the Bonbons were
represented by a pair of gold lamé gloves that belonged to David Bowie’s first wife, Angela [Fig.
6]. A “found object” in the avant-garde tradition, the gloves themselves were originally
presented by Angela to the Bonbons at the Roxy Theatre in Hollywood on January 3, 1974, sent
intact to the offices of FILE, and are now held in the General Idea Fonds at the National Gallery
of Canada in Ottawa.
18
Through the appropriation and circulation of such found objects—
16
Expert promoters and branders, the Bonbons also made T-shirts with their logo. One T-shirt with the Bonbons
logo in red rhinestones that was sent to Andy Warhol’s Factory has been expertly preserved in one of the artist’s
extensive time capsules and was uncovered by C. Ondine Chavoya in the process of organizing the exhibition Axis
Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.
17
Hoskyns, Glam!, 78.
18
Thanks to C. Ondine Chavoya for his meticulous and detailed research in uncovering these gloves during research
for Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A..
10
ranging from celebrity relics to a swiped rock club menu—the Bonbons imbued these materials
with fantasized meaning that sprang from their various mail art, music, and gay contexts.
In 1972 Dreva moved to Los Angeles, and Lambert followed suit in 1973. While in
Hollywood, the Bonbons cultivated a reputation as “artists-in-residence to the glitter scene.”
19
When he relocated, Lambert brought a variety of Bonbons materials, including two elaborately
embellished denim jackets and a pair of wildly quilted jeans, which would become part of the
Bonbons’ playful visual identities in Los Angeles. One jacket featured the Les Petites Bonbons
logo within a heart of rhinestones on the back and bejeweled trimming on the cuffs, collar, and
pockets; another jacket sported hand-sewn leather, satin, and velvet designs with metal studs
around the group’s name. Images of Lambert at Bingenheimer’s club show him wearing this
jacket with the quilted jeans made from textured floral and other patterned heavy upholstery
fabric. Lambert recalls that Iggy Pop greatly admired his jeans, prompting the musician to have a
similar pair fabricated for his appearance on the cover of the music magazine Creem.
20
Lambert’s intricate embellishments on no-frills working-class clothing bedazzle these
signifiers of butchness, campily upending the masculinity of the original garments. As a work of
craft, Lambert’s fashions are in line with a countercultural emphasis on the handmade that,
although it took greater hold in Northern California, was also a significant part of the Southern
California scene. This era also witnessed the feminist reclamation of traditional women’s
activities, such as crafting and sewing.
21
These outfits appear as a cornerstone of the Bonbons’
19
Jerry Dreva, “A Letter from Dreva,” High Performance 9, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 19. Dreva, Lambert, and an entire
group of Bonbons appear with Rodney Bingenheimer outside his eponymous club in a 1974 spread in People. See
“In Style: The Glitter Scene at Rodney’s Disco,” People 1, no. 6 (April 8, 1974): 30–31.
20
Creem 5, no. 11 (April 1974).
21
For a discussion on the importance of craft and costuming in San Francisco focusing on the Cockettes, see Julia
Bryan-Wilson, “Handmade Genders: Queer Costuming in San Francisco Circa 1970,” in West of Center: Art and the
Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977, ed. Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011), 76–93. For a consideration of the feminist history of craft, the most influential and
11
image in L.A.: Lambert and Dreva appeared wearing them at the DeccaDance, an international
meeting of correspondence artists modeled after a Hollywood awards ceremony held in Los
Angeles on January 17, 1974, at the Elk’s Lodge near MacArthur Park.
22
They also appear in the
jackets in a half-inch video documenting the opening of Twelve and Nine, an exhibition of artists
Roberto Gil de Montes and Dean Pappas at Otis Art Institute on March 27, 1974, which shows
numerous artists and other attendees, many dressed in elaborate glam fashion, including Carlos
Almaraz, Victor M. Durazo, Robert Legorreta, Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Meza, Fernando
Torres, and Patssi Valdez.
While press and promotional clippings from the period place the Bonbons squarely in the
city’s glitter scene, the video of the opening at Otis points to the often intersecting circle of
Chicana/o artists in which the Bonbons circulated. Dreva met Gronk in the early 1970s in Los
Angeles, both part of a nexus of artistic and gay cultures; the two would carry on an extensive
correspondence throughout the decade, culminating in the exhibition Dreva/Gronk 1968–1978:
Ten Years of Art / Life at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition) in March 1978.
Through Dreva, Gronk and fellow artist Teddy Sandoval began to work with Lambert. These
growing connections between the Bonbons and the Chicano artists directly involved with Asco—
Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie F. Herron III, and Patssi Valdez—point to the rich conceptual
affinities and shared practices between the two groups.
Between 1975 and 1978 Gronk mailed Lambert numerous photo postcards of Asco’s
archetypal artistic invention, the No Movie, a faux film still from a non-existent production.
Critiquing the absence of representations of Chicanos in popular culture, many No Movies
canonical text would be Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer, “Waste Not Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women
Saved and Assembled— FEMMAGE,” Heresies 4 (1978): 66–69.
22
These images were found by C. Ondine Chavoya during research for Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano
L.A. in 2012 with the Morris/Trasov Archive held at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University
of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
12
emphasize excess and narrative drama through a visual style of glittering artificiality, camp, and
psychosexual drama. The No Movie cards sent to Lambert display a particular panache for queer
play. For example, one striking color image by Gamboa, Parting Lips Party (1976) [Fig. 7],
presents Guillermo Estrada, whose movie star good looks made him a staple of many No Movies
at the time, shown biting and pulling with his mouth Valdez’s bottom lip, as his hand grabs her
hair; Gronk nestles his face close to Valdez, directing his gaze downward at Estrada, heightening
the sexual tension of the exchange; behind Valdez, Dee Dee Diaz, another No Movie regular,
gazes out; all the while Valdez holds out a glass of yellow liquid, which is easily overlooked in
all the activity. The image positions multiple players in an intricate web of desire, violence, and
unexplained intimacies, with just a hint of absurdity. Lambert reproduced three of the No Movie
cards in the second issue of Egozine, his glossy, self-published magazine, under the title
“Chicano Chic”;
23
the third issue included works by Sandoval and Gronk. In examining their
shared media strategies, art historian C. Ondine Chavoya has noted that the work of the Bonbons
and Asco “explore[s] the roles of mythmaking and the mass media in the creation of alternative
representations and histories as a means to imagine possible futures, and . . . infuse[s] camp
theatricality and ludic glamour into their use of commercial and media strategies for the
production of art.”
24
The heightened queer ambiguity in the images selected by Gronk for
Lambert makes tangible the shared and exchanged conceptual and aesthetic affinities between
the groups and their participants that were extended through publication and recirculation.
Glam’s emphasis on upending gender binaries through elaborate costuming, makeup, and
styling both provoked and reverberated alongside synchronistic practices in the arts,
23
Egozine, no. 2 (1977). Springing from Lambert’s use of the title, in addition to being the title of this thesis
“Chicano Chic” was also an early working title for the exhibition Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.
24
C. Ondine Chavoya, “Art and Life: Dreva/Gronk,” in Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987,
ed. C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art; Los Angeles:
Los Angeles Country Museum of Art; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), 288.
13
performance, music, and the wider culture. While still in their teens, Meza and Legorreta would
parade down the commercial thoroughfare of Whittier Boulevard in East L.A., dressed in
outrageous handmade outfits and makeup, self-described “psychedelic glitter queens.” Their later
collaborations with Gronk on absurdist performances, in which Legorreta first adopted the
persona of Cyclona, built upon the duo’s gender-bending trickery that upended Chicano
nationalism’s adherence to strict gender roles. A series of loose scrapbook pages held in
Legorreta’s papers at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center document these actions,
including the frenetic faux castration scene by Cyclona in Caca-Roaches Have No Friends
(1969) and The Wedding of Theresa Conchita Con Chin Gow (1971), a mock gay wedding on
the quad at California State University, Los Angeles. The costuming of Cyclona in these
actions—combining thrift-store finds with scraps of fabric, curtains, spangles, and tinsel
25
—was
reflective of a collision, and affinities, between glam and Chicano rasquache sensibilities that
utilized funky, vernacular, and low-class materials to produce a personalized aesthetic.²
26
Pages documenting the performance Cyclorama (1972) also show Meza in a floor-length
burgundy velvet jacket, an object lovingly recalled by Patssi Valdez.
27
Other pages from the
scrapbook chart Legorreta’s social milieu, such as a collage showing the preparation for a party
in which Meza dressed in an elaborately made costume of dual gender presentation: the left side
traditionally male with suit jacket, button-down shirt, bow tie, and slacks, and the right side
traditionally female with evening gown, blond wig, and white gloves [Fig. 8].
25
“I was influenced by Mae West, but since I couldn’t afford the diamonds I decided to use spangles and tinsel.”
Legorreta as quoted in Jennifer Flores Sternad and Robert Legorreta, “Cyclona and Early Chicano Performance
Art: An Interview with Robert Legorreta,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 3 (November
2006): 486.
26
Tomás Ybarra Frausto, “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,” in CARA: Chicano Art: Resistance and
Affirmation, 1965–1985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano (Los
Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, 1991), 155–62.
27
Patssi Valdez, conversation with the author and C. Ondine Chavoya, March 21, 2016, Los Angeles.
14
These performances can be situated within a lineage of experimentation around gender
presentation evolving from both glam music and an emergent performance art scene. The
exhibition Transformer: Aspekte der Travestie (Aspect of Travesty), held at the Kunstmuseum
Lucerne in 1974, brought together numerous artists who were complicating representations of
gender identities through photo-documentation of experiments with transvestism. While the
roster of self-identified artists was almost exclusively white European men, including Luciano
Castelli, Jürgen Klauke, and Urs Lüthi, the exhibition also included pop culture figures, such as
Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Brian Eno, as well as documentation of the San Francisco–based
performance troupe the Cockettes and members of Warhol’s Factory, including Jackie Curtis and
Candy Darling.
28
The year prior to Transformer, the German-born performance artist Ulay staged
S’he, a private performance (what the artist called an “intimate action”) in which he donned a
dual-gender costume with accompanying makeup, similar to Meza, documented in a series of
Polaroids in which the artist obsessively photographed himself with the intention to integrate
with other identities, particularly those of marginal individuals.
29
These examples are European,
partially referencing glam’s greater popularity in Europe. Yet seen alongside the performances
by Cyclona, Gronk, and Meza, these images and practices together demonstrate a striking
historical synchronicity and play between the popular and the avant-garde.
30
Where Ulay and the
work in Transformer sought a semblance of gender mimicry, or, at least, a visual relation to the
most conventional notions of femininity, the anarchistic gender performativity of Cyclona would
seem to implode rather than complicate the stability of gender. Still, when considering
28
Jean-Christophe Amman, Transformer: Aspekte der Travestie (Lucerne: Kunstmuseum Lucerne, 1974). See, also,
Jean-Christophe Amman, “After Transformer,” in Glam: The Performance of Style, 133–45; and Bruce Hainley,
“’Transformer,’” Artforum 43, no. 2 (October 2004): 74.
29
Dominic Johnson, “The Escape Artist: An Interview with Ulay,” in The Art of Living: An Oral History of
Performance Art (London: Palgrave, 2015), 24.
30
It should also be noted that the appearance of the dual gen-der costume was, in itself, not unique. For example,
the English artist and performer Andrew Logan appeared in a similar outfit in the photograph Andrew Logan as
Alternative Miss World host/ hostess (1973) by Mick Rock. This image was reproduced in 19 magazine (1974).
15
transnational cultural affinities, the fact that Chicana/o artists are rarely placed in dialogue with
other cultural peers should be noted. What this comparison ultimately demonstrates is the wide-
ranging appeal and playful potential of glam’s aesthetic provocations as it was creatively remade,
scraped together, or ultimately tossed aside to fit the diverse needs of artists working across
multiple contexts.
CLONES AND HOMEBOYS
A drawing by the artist Joey Terrill presents two identical men gazing out at the viewer from the
same position, their faces partially obscured in shadow, each wearing a tight, short-sleeved T-
shirt prominently displaying the text “Le Club for Boys.” The drawing is decidedly Pop-
inflected: their short, wav y hair is rendered with thick blocks of black and light blue, their lips
are a sumptuous pink, and their T-shirts are drawn with quick strokes of crayon in pale pink and
yellow. Sketched on two layers, the bottom paper shows Terrill’s loose use of crayon and mixed-
media to produce the defining blocks of color, while the top layer of semi-transparent vellum, cut
around the figures, outlines the details of their faces, bodies, and shirts; the play with
transparency adds a layer of both visual uniformity and distance from the scene, and the figures’
slightly ajar lips add a come-hither seductiveness [Fig. 9].
Produced between 1975 and 1976, Le Club for Boys (Two Brandos) displays an aesthetic
investment in the styles and sartorial presentations of the gay male clone.
31
Perhaps the most
defining archetype of gay male masculinity of the 1970s and early 1980s, the clone was young,
butch, urban, looking for casual sex, and easily identifiable through his stylistic self-presentation.
31
The men in Terrill’s drawing are modeled after Marlon Brando, an icon of machismo and male desirability the
clone would emulate. Terrill, conversation, 2016.
16
Far from the gender-bending glitter queen and hippie activist, the clone performed an
exaggerated manliness and his style was uniform. Terrill was not the only participant in this
network of artists examining—as well as playfully upending—the clone and presentations of gay
male masculinity; the phrase on the T-shirt in the drawing was the name of the mail art
institution of artist Jack Vargas,
32
while the prints, drawings, and mail art of Sandoval and his
own group, the Butch Gardens School of Art, display a similar mischievous investment in the
styles of gay men at the time. These three Los Angeles–based artists, often working together or
in dialogue, examined, playfully rendered, sometimes seductively presented, sometimes
humorously critiqued the clone, often alongside another archetype of masculinity of the time, the
Chicano homeboy. The quotidian T-shirt, as a piece of clothing that was identified with both
youth culture and the working class, crosses these sartorial categories of clone and homeboy,
presented in artworks, worn on the street, and utilized as an object of group identification and
conspicuous consumption.
/
The clone was an invention of the immediate post-liberation era. As sociologist Martin P. Levine
put it in his study Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone: “When the dust of
gay liberation had settled, the doors of the closet opened, and out popped the clone.”
33
Indigenous to the gay enclaves of urban centers in the United States, the clone’s most defining
32
A drawing in the first issue of Terrill’s mail art magazine Homeboy Beautiful (1978) would also include two
men in “Le Club for Boys” T-shirts, another example of how these artists were referencing and integrating the
groups and artistic identifies of each other into their projects.
33
Martin P. Levine, Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone (New York: NYU Press,
1998), 7.
17
characteristic was sameness; he modeled himself on the styles and butch masculinity of working-
class men and was the product of stylized gender performativity:
He wore blue-collar garb—flannel shirts over muscle T-shirts, Levi 501s over
work boots, bomber jackets over hooded sweaters. He kept his hair short and had
a thick mustache or closely cropped beard. There was nothing New Age or hippie
about this reformed gay liberationist. And the clone lived the fast life. He “partied
hard,” taking recreational drugs, dancing in discos till dawn, having hot sex with
strangers.
34
Much of queerness is rooted in forms of signification and self-presentation that may or may not
be under-stood by the wider culture, and the clone was certainly no stranger to these patterns.
While the most conspicuous clone uniform is described in Gay Macho, the clone universe
included other “types” with varying degrees of costuming—leather, uniform, western—forms of
identity construction through capitalist consumption that marked the shift from gay liberation to
gay life-style by the mid-1970s. Typified by a gym-toned body and a willful disregard for
individualism, the clone was most certainly not for everybody. Yet it is important to remember
that the gender performativity presented by the clone was also a projection of sexual desire and
desiring, combating the stigmatization of homo-sexuality and its popular association with
effeminacy through the butching-up of display and the repetition and exaggeration of traditional
masculinity.
Modeling a masculinity to which he likely had little direct connection, the prototypical
clone was assumed white, raised with affluence in the suburbs, and employed in a nine-to-five
job, and thus his working-class duds were a costume he might take on and off. Levine’s study of
the clone largely ignores a consideration of racial difference within the social scene his book
34
Ibid., 7–8.
18
charts; passing remarks problematically contend that Latino and black men might have enjoyed
greater visibility in the clone world due to their cultural associations with that blue-collar
masculinity the clone sought to emulate.
35
The turmoil of late 1960s cultural and political movements saw multiple reevaluations of
masculinity that extended into the 1970s. Within the Chicano civil rights movement, the
emphasis on Chicanismo placed the masculinity of young, radical men (carnales, or brothers)
profoundly at the heart of a collective liberation of la raza (the race or the people).
36
Bonded
through homosocial—rather than homosexual— brotherhood, Chicanismo placed women and
gay men at odds with Chicano nationalism’s reliance on the centrality of the nuclear family and
patriarchal order. In considering the place of gay men within Chicano politics, scholar Richard T.
Rodríguez has pointed to the complications gays and lesbians posed to Chicano nationalism,
citing José Armas’s polemical essay “Machismo” from 1975, which took aim at the women’s
and gay liberation movements for condemning the macho.
37
In other writings, however,
Rodríguez has pointed to possibilities for the meeting of Chicanismo and the aesthetics of gay
men through the queering of the Chicano homeboy aesthetic. Identifiable through key signifiers
such as clothing, specifically baggy khaki pants and white undershirt, a shaved head, tattoos, and
a macho stance, the aesthetics of the homeboy emerged in the 1970s, as a resistance to the
Anglo-American criminalization of Chicano masculinity. As Rodríguez contends, the “queer
35
Levine also notes the potential “association with danger, and a rougher masculinity,” black men may have had.
Ibid., 10–11, 82. The potential negative and destructive implications of racial fetishization of men of color by white
men are not discussed, how-ever, and many scholars and authors contributed significantly to discussion of ethnic
fetishization and queer interracial desire, of-ten related to questions around pornography. See Hiram Pérez, A Taste
for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire (New York: NYU Press, 2015); Jennifer Christine
Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2014); Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: NYU
Press, 2014); and Christopher Ortiz, “Hot and Spicy: Representation of Chicano/Latino Men in Gay Pornography,”
Jump Cut 39 (June 1994): 83–90.
36
Ramón A. Gutiérrez, “Community, Patriarchy and Individualism: The Politics of Chicano History and the
Dream of Equality,” American Quarterly 45, no. 1 (March 1993): 45–46.
37
Richard T. Rodríguez, Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2009), 145–47.
19
homeboy aesthetic, however, refers to a style, circulating within Chicano/Latino gay male
spaces, whose visibility emanates from the inter-play of materiality and fantasy.”
38
The queering
of the homeboy presents a “fusion of fetishistic desire and revisionist pleasure,” that both refuses
and conforms to the macho fashion preferences of Chicanismo.
39
The confluence of the clone and the homeboy might be most prominently seen across
multiple genres in the work of artist Teddy Sandoval. During the 1970s he consistently employed
images of anonymous, faceless male figures prominently sporting lustrous mustaches.
Frequently, Sandoval’s unidentified figure(s) stood in as a representation of self, while at other
times the image was employed as archetypal and unknown or as a site of fantasy and desire. If
the face is the site of recognition of alterity and individuality, in their visual uniformity
Sandoval’s faceless men deny specific identities, yet in their presentation these anonymous
figures always project outward, desiring recognition as ciphers for intersecting fantasies of gay
male Chicanismo and clone masculinity that do not necessarily conflict but rather sit easily
within one another.
Sandoval’s illustration in a June 1981 issue of the Los Angeles–based erotic gay
magazine In Touch for Men points to the ways in which his signature style easily lent itself to the
categorization of masculine types offered up in post-liberation gay culture [Fig. 10].
Accompanying the article “The Daddy Mystique” by writer and noted leatherman Jack Fritscher,
a two-page spread shows five men in a row, each rendered in Sandoval’s signature
facelessness.
40
While their identities are presented as uniformly anonymous, each is a slightly
different “daddy” type—mirroring the multiple encounters with and types of daddies Fritscher
38
Richard T. Rodríguez, “Queering the Homeboy Aesthetic,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 31, no. 2 (Fall
2006): 128.
39
Ibid., 128.
40
Jack Fritscher, “The Daddy Mystique,” In Touch for Men, no. (June 1981): 26–32.
20
recounts in his article—though all are decidedly muscled, and four sport iterations of a
prominent mustache. Using acrylic paint in combination with pastel and colored pencils for
details, Sandoval adds an expressive quick whip of pastel across the face of three of the figures, a
visual motif he utilized in other media. In their frontal seriality, Sandoval’s anonymous figures
present as a selection of men for the picking, as well as recall more insidious references, such as
a police line-up or mug shot, a motif Sandoval would mine in other print work and mail art. In an
earlier presentation at his studio, Sandoval juxtaposed large drawings (no longer extant) of
faceless, mustached men, rendered nearly life-size, that, through their installation, resonated with
gay male sociability of the 1970s [Fig. 11]. Drawn on lightweight fabric tracing paper, which
was readily available in the city’s fashion district, one work depicts a mustached man leaning
erotically against a field of art-deco tiles, his arms raised over his head, confidently displaying
his torso. On an adjacent wall is another drawing on fabric paper, this one identifiable as a
portrait of Gronk through the name emblazoned across the figure’s chest. The pairing is
complemented by the installation of a rack with a towel from a local YMCA, situating the two
works within a cruisey scene.
Mail art postcards distributed by Sandoval similarly engaged with and circulated the
artist’s play with gay and homeboy sartorial style. Some also focused on the stereotypical
symbols and iconography of Americanized Latinidad: American Tacos (1978), reproduced in the
third issue of Robert Lambert’s Egozine, shows, against a background of taco shapes, the outline
of a faceless homeboy in an undershirt with a tattoo on his arm and a bandana around his
forehead [Fig. 12]; other mail art pieces as well as prints show men nude except for a small pair
of chili-pepper patterned underwear, a not-so-subtle phallic visual pun. In an-other example of
affinities and shared content, some of Sandoval’s mail art works were reproduced in Terrill’s
21
self-published magazine, Homeboy Beautiful (1978–79), which paid particular attention to dress
and style, including fashion makeover profiles as well as detailed descriptions of the magazine’s
target audience, the “homo-homeboy,” including what he was wearing and how he presented
himself. With a similar eye toward masculine archetypes, but utilizing dierent aesthetic and
conceptual devices, the mail art of Jack Vargas imbued the burly father figure with queer desire,
often mining mainstream representations of white men: an insert in a copy of his faux newsletter
Suburban J (with the J standing for joto, Spanish slang for faggot) features a color photocopy of
1970s butch icon Burt Reynolds [Fig. 13].
While the output of the Butch Gardens School of Art had its eye on men and masculinity,
it was not without an awareness of the inherent gender play in all this butched-up facade. Mail
art from Sandoval also circulated a face-less female figure, that of Sandoval’s alter ego Rosa de
la Montaña—a play on Duchamp’s cross-dressing persona Rrose Sélavy—who not only
appeared in Sandoval’s visual repertoire but also sent and received mail art, signed objects, and
hosted exhibitions at Sandoval’s studio. In a card sent to the United Kingdom–based mail artist
Pauline Smith, founder of the satirical Adolf Hitler Fan Club, Rosa appears against a background
of flying vaginas.
41
While these examples demonstrate how gay Chicano artists were presenting and
upending masculinity through representations across artistic mediums and genres, many were
simultaneously using their practices to directly intervene in political life. In 1976 Joey Terrill
produced a series of hand-drawn T-shirts emblazoned with the words malflora, a Spanish slang
term for a lesbian translating to “dirty flower,” and maricón, slang for faggot. The words were
written in an Old English tagging style across the shirt’s front, while on the back, near the shirt’s
41
C. Ondine Chavoya discovered this card in the papers of Pauline Smith at the Tate Archive while conducting
research for Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.
22
neckline, was written “rolemodel” in block lettering; the combination of texts on the T-shirts
reclaims pejorative slurs while asserting an affirmative identity. Photographs by Sandoval of a
group of primarily men, but some women, show them wearing the T-shirts as they marched in
line down Hollywood Boulevard as part of the Los Angeles Christopher Street West Pride parade
[Fig. 14]. Their participation represented a collective claiming of space for Chicana/os within an
emerging queer public sphere, one that may or may not have understood the shirt’s culturally
loaded reclamation, or necessarily welcomed such an action. Terrill’s intervention utilized the
most quotidian of garments, the T-shirt, as the mediator for performing queer and Chicana/o
politics, a gesture that refers to previous Chicano, feminist, and gay and lesbian political
movements of the 1970s, of which Terrill was well-versed and an active participant, as well as to
a history of working-class fashion.
The malflora and maricón T-shirts were preceded by shirts Terrill created for the 1975
Pride parade. Reproduced as part of a photospread in Come Out Fighting, a newsletter of the
Marxist gay liberation group Lavender & Red Union, a photograph by Tami Tyler shows
Terrill’s cousin Pat in a shirt with bold block letters spelling “dyke,” her arm around her then
girlfriend Martha, who wears a shirt broadcasting “lesbian”; on the far right, Terrill appears with
“faggot” across his chest. The image was subsequently reproduced by the Lavender & Red
Union on the cover of their 1976 gay liberation/ socialist anthology [Fig. 15].
42
Terrill had no
direct connection to the group, yet their use of the image points to the political salience of the
sartorial gesture. While the assertion of one’s queer identity within a Pride parade is today
commonplace, it should be noted that in the mid-1970s the parade was still a potentially
dangerous site of resistance given widespread public homophobia and rampant violence directed
42
“Come Out Fighting,” no. 4 (1975). The Lavender & Red Book: A Gay Liberation/Socialist Anthology (Los
Angeles: Lavender and Red Union, April 1976). Printed by the Peace Press in Los Angeles.
23
at gays and lesbians by the LAPD. A year later, the malflora and maricón T-shirts take Terrill’s
assertion of pride and visibility one step further, affirming Chicanidad within a queer culture that
was at times resistant to racial difference. Take, for example, the numerous protests of the Studio
One disco for its discriminatory practice of requiring multiple forms of identification for women
and people of color to enter.
43
Terrill’s T-shirts place Chicana/os as active participants in the emerging generation of
gay and lesbian activists of the 1970s. Perhaps one of the most poignant predecessors can be
seen in the Lavender Menace action at the Second Congress to Unite Women, held on May 1,
1970, in New York City. Coined in 1969 by Betty Friedan, then president of the National
Organization for Women (NOW), “Lavender Menace” pejoratively referred to the threat
supposedly posed by lesbianism to the national feminist movement. Reacting to the perceived
homophobia of activist Susan Brownmiller, who, in response to Friedan, described lesbians as
less a menace and more a “lavender herring,” a group of close to forty demonstrators took
control of the Congress, all wearing hand-dyed lavender T-shirts screenprinted in block letters
“Lavender Menace.” As participant Karla Jay recalls, the demonstration inspired audience
members to assert a desire to join the group, and redirected the Congress’ conversations to
address the place of lesbians within the movement, while empowering other disenfranchised
groups to address the women’s movement’s entrenched racism and classism.
44
Terrill’s malflora
and maricón T-shirts and those of the Lavender Menace both elicited various forms of dis-
identification—to use scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s conception for how minority subjects
43
Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A., 236. See, also, the “Studio One” subject file, ONE Subject Files Collection,
ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.
44
Kara Jay, Tales of a Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 143–44.
24
negotiate and create space within an often hostile culture
45
—from the larger progressive groups
in which they sought to intervene, reclaiming the insult as a politically mobilizing group identity.
WINDOW TO STAGE
Responding to sensational headlines of the day, an August 1981 window display depicting the
abduction of a three-year-old child by a coyote in L.A.’s suburbs at the trendy fashion boutique
Maxfield Bleu elicited a barrage of complaints, including from the child’s family.
46
In response,
the display was quickly removed. The work of Mundo Meza and British ex-pat Simon Doonan, it
was a particularly noteworthy example of the mix of dark humor and tableaux anarchy the duo
advanced through their window projects. Documentation shows a female mannequin
(representing the child’s mother) dressed in a sleek black jump-suit as she nonchalantly waters
the grass/AstroTurf with a hose while her daughter, dressed in a child-size Maxfield Bleu T-shirt,
is dragged away by a snarling taxidermied coyote. In juxtaposition to the horrifying set-up in the
foreground, the mural-sized background, painted by Meza, of loosely rendered palm trees
glowing a soft blue against a field of calm white, visually conveys the supposed ease and
prototypical sunshine of Southern California living [Fig. 16].
As works of visual merchandising, all of Meza and Doonan’s displays at Maxfield Bleu
had a relatively quick turnover; the next window was never far behind. In their irreverence,
confrontation, scavenged aesthetic, and dark humor, the window displays of Meza and Doonan
share strong affinities with the sensibilities of the practitioners of the first wave of L.A. punk in
45
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
46
Simon Doonan, Confessions of a Window Dresser: Tales from a Life in Fashion (New York: Penguin Studio,
2001), 41. The coyote attack of three-year-old Kelly Lynn Keen received considerable me-dia attention. See Jan
Klunder, “Child’s Death Confirms Official’s Fears About Coyotes,” Los Angeles Times, August 30, 1981, GB1.
25
Hollywood, which was noteworthy for its particular brand of excess and aggressive glamour, as
well as the costuming and theatricality of the New Romantics.
47
In their attention to the potential
of both everyday objects and fantastical props for deviously playful extravagance, these window
displays find affinities with the mesmerizing antics of punk performance artists such as Johanna
Went, challenging the conventions of the stage through aggressive costuming and deliriously
abject actions.
Located during the early 1980s at 9091 Santa Monica Boulevard near Doheny Drive in
the area that is today the City of West Hollywood,
48
Maxfield Bleu was owned by Anne-Marie
and Tommy Perse; in January 1978, Tommy invited Doonan to move to Los Angeles and work
for him after seeing his window displays in London. In Los Angeles, Doonan met Meza. The two
became lovers for a period, and later friends and close artistic collaborators, with Doonan
inviting Meza to work with him on the windows at Maxfield. Eventually Meza would execute his
own freelance window projects at other area retailers.
49
For Meza, the forays into fashion culture
were not new: in the mid-to-late 1970s, he had worked for Fred Slatten, “the King of Santa
Monica Boulevard,” painting and collaging outrageously high platform shoes for his store
located just blocks from Maxfields.
50
Before working with Meza, Doonan’s earlier projects at
47
While the relation between glam and punk is often surmised as oppositional, the affinities between the two
movements in L.A. have received new attention. See, Colin Gunckel, “‘People Think We’re Weird ’Cause We’re
Queer’: Art Meets Punk in Los Angeles,” in Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., ed. C. Ondine Chavoya
and David Evans Frantz (Los Angeles: ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, forthcoming
2017): 267–87.
48
The store would move to a Brutalist concrete building at 8325 Melrose Avenue in 1985.
49
See, Simon Doonan, “Mundo Goes to Hollywood,” in Axis Mundo, 367–69; and Doonan, “Hollywood,” in
Nasty: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2005), 235–53.
50
Oral history interview with Simon Doonan and Mundo Meza, interview by Marsha Bentley Hale, c. 1983,
personal collection of Marsha Bentley Hale. Meza’s work at Slatten’s store is also mentioned in two different one-
page biographical documents compiled by Robert Legorreta and the Meza family, and recalled by Patssi Valdez in
conversation with the author, 2016.
26
Maxfields similarly mined the shocking and grotesque: one display from 1980 showed a woman
protruding from beneath a massive faux boulder that engulfed the entire window.
51
Beginning in the late 1970s, Maxfield Bleu became known for importing high-end
fashion from Japan and as an early supporter of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto,
whose designs emphasized minimalist and deconstructed forms.
52
The relatively simple and
typically monochromatic fashions that adorned the display’s mannequins were a foil to the visual
dynamism of Meza and Doonan’s productions, while their thrifty budget and cast-off materials
(according to the Los Angeles Times, Doonan had a budget of $50 per window in 1980
53
) stood
in contrast to the high-end luxury items and the store’s celebrity clientele. Doonan recalls Perse’s
unique collection of vintage European mannequins from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, which
“expressed a doll-like irony and innocence,” adding an extra layer of wicked humor to the
disconcerting displays.
54
For Meza, the windows merged with his artistic practice, becoming
sites for the presentation of large-scale paintings, including massive stylized human faces in
bright blue, yellow, and orange [Fig. 17], as well as his evolving style of loosely painted abstract
com-positions inflected with cubist forms.
55
While Doonan’s window projects emphasized
narrative drama, Meza’s increasingly took on surrealistic qualities through his keen eye for
material juxtaposition: for example, multiple windows included animal heads and masks on
mannequins; when asked in an interview conducted by mannequin historian Marsha Bentley
Hale if he and Doonan ever had to change anything in their displays, Meza dryly retorted,
51
Pamela Moreland, “At $2 Billion, It’s More Than Window Dressing: Store Displays Sophisticated, Shocking,”
Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1980, E1.
52
Michael Gross, “Avant-garde Styles in a Hidden Oasis,” New York Times, September 19, 1987, A32.
53
Moreland, “At $2 Billion.”
54
Doonan, Confessions of a Window Dresser, 37.
55
Meza’s merging of painting and window projects was not unlike the often-cited early window displays of Pop
artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol. See Maria Vaizey, “The
Crossover from Commercial to Fine Art,” RSA Journal 137, 5400 (November 1989): 814–185. See, also, Cécile
Whiting’s examination of Warhol’s Bonwit Teller’s window in A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender and Consumer
Culture, Cambridge Studies in American Visual Culture (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
27
“Taxidermied animals aren’t very popular,” pointing to multiple instances when the grotesque
combinations caused consternation from owners or the public.
56
Other windows by Meza used
uncanny and contradictory pairings, such as a display that showed one of the vintage mannequins
in a futuristic black jumpsuit with yellow trimming whose hand has been positioned to cup the
tail end of a long beard of dried grass flowing from a faux-Polynesian mask [Fig. 18].
57
While Maxfield Bleu would not relocate to the strip until 1985, the store has often been
considered within the changing fashion culture of Los Angeles in the 1980s, which saw Melrose
Avenue between La Cienega and La Brea transform from a sleepy thoroughfare into a
destination for punk, new wave, and high-end fashions. Noteworthy as a rare, pedestrian-friendly
stretch—a 1983 article from the Los Angeles Times compares the street to New York’s SoHo and
London’s King’s Road
58
—other stores on the street, such as Ecru, Flip, Melons (where Meza
also produced windows), Parachute, Poseur, Retail Slut, and Roppongi epitomized the
confluence of high-end, decadently punk, and retro new-wave fashion.
This period of heightened fashion culture coincided with a brief subcultural aair with
New Romantic style and dress in Los Angeles at clubs such as Anti-club, Club Lingerie, The
Fake, and The Veil. Like glam, New Romantics was also an import from the United Kingdom,
rejecting the growing macho violence represented in hardcore punk by emphasizing luxurious
materials, such as silks, lace, ruffles, and velvet, with camp theatricality and anachronistic
period-style costumes. Musician Adam Ant’s swashbuckling pirate get-ups might be the most
recognizable iteration of the style, mirrored in Meza’s brief appearance wearing a red vest and
56
Doonan and Meza, interview.
57
A consideration of Meza’s window displays would not be possible without photocopied images saved by Jef
Huereque and the archival impulse of fashion and mannequin historian Marsha Bentley Hale, who lovingly
preserved traces of the window displays of Meza and others during this period.
58
Charles Wallace, “Transformation from ‘Dead Street’ to Trendy Commercial Spot Alienates Longtime
Neighbors,” Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1983, B1.
28
eye patch in the music video for Kim Carnes’s pop-song “Bette Davis Eyes” (1981).
59
Doonan
has pointed to his and Meza’s play with the style at the time, as well as their friendship with club
personalities such as British ex-pat Pinkietessa, who often dressed in exaggerated Victorian
style.
60
While the idiosyncratic costuming of New Romantics may not have directly found its
way into Meza and Doonan’s windows, its freedom and exaggerated flamboyance can certainly
be observed, pointing to a unique interplay between club culture and fashion installation. An
examination of the punk performances of Johanna Went illuminates similar connections.
Beginning in the late 1970s, Johanna Went had a growing presence in the city’s punk
scene, performing her chaotic and abject events at clubs such as Al’s Bar, Hong Kong Café, the
Music Machine, the Starwood, and other venues primarily in Hollywood and Chinatown. Went
was perhaps the city’s most visible point of connection between the punk music scene and
performance art (though she rarely identified herself as a performance artist). In Went’s stage
acts, a rotating cast of collaborating band members including Greg Burk, Kerry McBride, Mark
and Brock Wheaton, Z’EVE, and others, would play loud, improvised music as Went would
scream, squeak, and produce guttural noises while frenetically donning, removing, and altering a
series of costumes. In a series of tightly shot portraits taken by musician and correspondence
artist Ferrara Brain Pan at the Hong Kong Café in 1979, part of a bill with the queer punk band
Nervous Gender, the punk band Monitor, and Boyd Rice’s noise band NON, Went is shown in
quick succession as one outfit leads to another [Fig. 19]. The images capture the frenetic change
of costumes and props: a cape of connected plastic strawberry baskets, a telephone hat, long
tendrils of plastic tubing and unspooled 35mm film, a mannequin torso with a baby-doll head
and multiple dildos attached to it (Went often incorporated sex toys into her performances), and,
59
Meza appears in the video at 1:59 minutes.
60
Doonan, “Mundo Goes to Hollywood.”
29
in conclusion, an enormous eyeball oozing fake blood after Went plunges her hand into the
prop’s iris.
Went’s stage antics and the window displays of Meza and Doonan share an affinity for
the transformation of props and other objects through imaginative and unanticipated means.
However, the connection was also grounded in the direct sharing of materials; on occasion Went
received props from Doonan and Meza left over from window projects.
61
In discussing where he
found inspiration for his window displays, Meza stated that he found equal inspiration at K-Mart
and Hollywood prop houses.
62
In a similar vein, Went has discussed her “affection for objects”
and said, “I believe that observing and touching these objects stimulates my imagination in such
a way that I actually feel they communicate with me.”
63
The scavenging for fantastical,
humorous, and abject materials shared by Went and Meza recalls the bric-a-brac ingenuity of
Meza’s early performative collaborations with Cyclona and Gronk, as well as other earlier queer
luminaries, such as the Cockettes or Jack Smith, who transformed detritus into wildly
imaginative and fabulous props, cast-offs, and materials for remaking styles.
64
Went’s
transference of objecthood through costuming and adornment points to a sparkling excess that
cuts across Meza’s production.
Went’s performances and the collaborative windows of Doonan and Meza also
importantly exhibit a shared attraction for working in spaces where art would be unexpected and,
in certain cases, unwelcome. Though Went often performed at alternative art spaces such as
LACE or Beyond Baroque, she has stated unequivocally her preference for punk and new wave
61
In an interview with the punk magazine Slash, Went also makes reference to an upcoming performance in the
window of the May Company downtown. Through likely a put-on, Went’s desire to perform in a store window
connects to her wish to reach a non–art world audience while recalling her earlier career per-forming on the street
with performance pioneer Tom Murrin. See the interview with Johanna Went in Slash 3, no. 4 (1980): 22–23.
62
Doonan and Meza, interview.
63
Lauren Versal, “Portrait of Johanna Went (Los Angeles: Woman’s Building, 1989),” and Karen Finely, “Artist
Interview: Johanna Went,” Coagula Art Journal (May 1998): 20–21.
64
Bryan-Wilson, “Handmade Genders.”
30
clubs. The club stage presented entirely different possibilities for performing, allowing for or
actively fostering spontaneity, experimentation, and a direct relation to actions and objects.
65
The
codes for spectatorship were also different, as the active energy of audience members—far from
the detached viewer of the art gallery—was a driving force behind the scene’s dynamism. A
similar unconventional relationship to spectatorship and production is found in the windows:
though designed to sell high-priced items, the displays themselves were unprecious, often
incorporating raw materials and taken down within a week of their mounting; as displays, their
viewers were not necessarily arts audiences but a fashionable public increasingly looking for
shock, camp, and wild play. While they might, on their face, seem divergent, the practices of
Doonan, Meza, and Went demonstrate a unique conceptual and aesthetic jump from boutique
window to punk stage (that existed, if only for a brief moment) in L.A. in the early 1980s.
CONCLUSION
In the early 1980s, Meza was diagnosed as HIV positive, succumbing to the disease in 1985, an
early casualty of the AIDS epidemic. In the early years, it was the development of Kaposi
sarcoma (KS) that was one of the first indicators of retroviral status. For a generation of young
gay men, the red or purple KS lesions that developed across the body, and were especially
prominent on the neck and face, were the initial sign of what for many would be a rapid decline
in vitality. To a homo-phobic and misinformed public, the visibility of KS lesions marked an
HIV-positive individual as violently other, the national hysteria around the disease magnifying
the latent sentiment that gay men were pathological, criminal, and vectors of disease.
65
Suzanne Lacy and Jennifer Flores Sternad, “Voices, Variations, and Deviations: From the LACE Archive of
Southern California Performance Art,” in Live Art in LA, ed. Peggy Phelan (New York: Routledge, 2012), 98.
31
Always up for extravagant costuming, Meza and partner Jef Huereque appeared at a
Halloween party around 1982 or 1983 in elaborate matching outfits that covered Meza’s KS with
makeup and costuming devised by Huereque. These “Drag Queens from Outer Space” outfits
concealed their bodies in black floor-length, tube-like dresses with long sleeves, black gloves,
and tight hoods that only allowed part of the face to protrude through a hole in the front [Fig.
20]. A glistening blue over-garment with protruding clear tubes covered the upper body and
extended the shoulders; elf-like black ears were attached to the sides of the hoods; antennas and
other trinkets and accessories embellished the outfits. Black makeup covered their faces, hiding
any marks that might be visible on Meza. Photographs of the two show them gleefully modeling
their fabulous outfits in their loft at The Brewery Art Colony near Downtown Los Angeles. They
won the award for best costume that evening.
Through the assertion of otherworldly gender-play and the utilization of sparkling glam
aesthetics, these outfits harken back to Meza’s youthful experimentations with glitter and queer
embodiment through adornment. With added potency and urgency, the creative and affirmational
potentiality for costuming and play was used to combat stigmatization during the early years of
the AIDS pandemic. As this example makes clear, costuming was politically powerful and life-
affirming in the face of the widespread decimation of AIDS. Ray Navarro’s appearance as Jesus
Christ at the Stop the Church action planned by ACT UP/New York and WHAM! (Women’s
Heath Action and Mobilization) similarly points to the potential for costuming to mischievously
trouble the political. Protesting the repressive stance on sexual heath and women’s reproductive
rights by Cardinal O’Connor, Navarro’s presentation as Christ challenged the moral authority of
the religious right through irreverent dress up [Fig. 21]. As this thesis lays out, what we use to
cover and adorn our bodies with, and how we navigate our lives while adorned, carries inherent
32
potentiality for queerness unbound; the heterogeneous work of this network of queer Chicano
artists and their collaborators points to numerous in-stances of irreverent and fabulous
convergences where costuming and fashion were central to cultural, political, artistic, and
musical movements that reexamined the potential for art, life, and living queerly (with a good
amount of style for good measure).
33
FIGURES
Fig. 1: Anthony Friedkin, Jim and Mundo in Mundo’s Bedroom, Montebello, East Los Angeles,
1972 (printed 2017). Photograph from an unprinted negative for The Gay Essay, 1969–73.
Gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm). Gift of Anthony Friedkin. ONE National Gay &
Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries
34
Fig. 2: Anthony Friedkin, Jim, Restroom at Trouper’s Hall, Hollywood, 1970 (printed 2017).
From The Gay Essay, 1969–73. Gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm). Gift of
Anthony Friedkin. ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries
35
Fig. 3: Joey Terrill and Efren Valadez, Flyer for the Gay Funky Dances at Troupers Hall,
c. 1974. Collection of Joey Terrill
36
Fig. 4: Jerry Dreva, Colorful cock print sent to Mikhail Itkin, c. 1973. Day-Glo paint, stickers,
and ink on paper, 7 x 11 in. (17.8 x 27.9 cm). Mikhail Itkin Papers. ONE National Gay &
Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries
37
Fig. 5: Flyer from Les Petites Bonbons sent to Mikhail Itkin, c. 1973. Black-and-white thermal
photocopy, 11 x 8 ½ in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm). Mikhail Itkin Papers. ONE National Gay & Lesbian
Archives at the USC Libraries
38
Fig. 6: Cover of FILE Megazine 3, no. 1, “Glamour Issue” (Autumn 1975), and interior spread
showing Les Petites Bonbons’ submission of Angela Bowie’s golden gloves. Collection of
Robert Lambert. Photos by Ian Byers-Gamber
39
Fig. 7: Asco, No Movie photo postcard, Parting Lips Party (1976), sent to Robert Lambert’s
Egozine by Gronk, postmarked August 16, 1976. Photo by Harry Gamboa Jr. Collection of
Robert Lambert. © Harry Gamboa Jr.
40
Fig. 8: Robert Legorreta (Cyclona), Scrapbook page with Cyclona, Mundo Meza, and friends,
c. early 1970s (date assembled unknown). Color photographs on construction paper, 11 ¼ x 11 ¾
in. (27.9 x 29.8 cm). Cyclona Collection. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
41
Fig. 9: Joey Terrill, Le Club for Boys (Two Brandos), c. 1975–76. Mixed-media on vellum and
paper, 14 x 16 ¾ in. (35.6 x 42.5 cm). Collection of Joey Terrill. Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber
42
Fig. 10: Teddy Sandoval, Untitled illustration reproduced in In Touch for Men, no. 56 (June
1981). ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries
43
Fig. 11: Teddy Sandoval, Installation in the artist’s studio in Downtown Los Angeles, c. 1978.
Gronk Papers. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
44
Fig. 12: Teddy Sandoval, American Tacos mail art postcard, postmarked March 7, 1978, as
reproduced in to Robert Lambert’s Egozine, no. 3 (1979). Ink on paper, 8 ½ x 5 ½ in. (21.6 x 14
cm). Collection of Robert Lambert. Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber
45
Fig. 13: Jack Vargas, Suburban J, c. 1975. Color photocopy newsletter, 8 ½ x 7 in. (21.6 x 17.8
cm) folded. Collection of Joey Terrill. Photos by Ian Byers-Gamber
46
Fig. 14: Participants in the Christopher Street West Pride parade wearing Joey Terrill’s malflora
and maricón T-shirts, June 1976. Terrill appears third from the left. Photo by Teddy Sandoval.
Courtesy of Paul Polubinskas
47
Fig. 15: The Lavender & Red Book: A Gay Liberation/Socialist Anthology (April 1976). Cover
features Joey Terrill, his cousin Pat, and her then girlfriend Martha, wearing T-shirts produced
by Terrill. ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries
48
Fig. 16: Simon Doonan and Mundo Meza, Documentation of a window display at Maxfield
Bleu, West Hollywood, August 1981. Courtesy of Simon Doonan
49
Fig. 17: Mundo Meza, Documentation of a window display at Maxfield Bleu, West Hollywood,
c. early 1980s. Photo by Mundo Meza. Courtesy of Marsha Bentley Hale
50
Fig. 18: Mundo Meza, Documentation of a window display at Maxfield Bleu, West Hollywood,
c. early 1980s. Photo by Mundo Meza. Courtesy of Marsha Bentley Hale
51
Fig. 19: Johanna Went, Documentation of an untitled performance at the Hong Kong Café,
Los Angeles, July 11, 1980. Photos by Ferrara Brain Pan. Courtesy of Ferrara Brain Pan
52
Fig. 20: Jef Huereque and Mundo Meza dressed as “Drag Queens from Outer Space,”
c. 1982–83. Collection of Jef Huereque
53
Fig. 21: DIVA TV, Stills featuring Ray Navarro from Like a Prayer, 1990. Digitized VHS video,
28 min. Ray Navarro Papers and Videos. ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC
Libraries
54
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Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás. “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility.” In CARA: Chicano Art:
Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985, edited by Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa
McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, 155–62. Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, 1991.
Abstract (if available)
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Frantz, David Evans
(author)
Core Title
Chicano chic: fashion/costume/play
School
Roski School of Art and Design
Degree
Master of Arts
Degree Program
Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere
Publication Date
07/12/2019
Defense Date
08/01/2017
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
Chicano art,Costume,Dreva, Jerry,Fashion,Friedkin, Anthony,gay and lesbian activism,glam rock,Lambert, Robert,Les Petites Bonbons,Los Angeles,mail art,Meza, Mundo,New Romanticism,OAI-PMH Harvest,punk performance,queer aesthetics,Sandoval, Teddy,Terrill, Joey,Vargas, Jack,Went, Johanna
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Jones, Amelia (
committee chair
)
Creator Email
davidevansfrantz@gmail.com,defrantz@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-396840
Unique identifier
UC11264198
Identifier
etd-FrantzDavi-5503.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-396840 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-FrantzDavi-5503.pdf
Dmrecord
396840
Document Type
Thesis
Rights
Frantz, David Evans
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
Chicano art
Dreva, Jerry
Friedkin, Anthony
gay and lesbian activism
glam rock
Lambert, Robert
Les Petites Bonbons
mail art
Meza, Mundo
New Romanticism
punk performance
queer aesthetics
Sandoval, Teddy
Terrill, Joey
Vargas, Jack
Went, Johanna